Minnesota Court Filing Fees by County

How Minnesota court filing fees are actually set

Minnesota sits between Georgia and Florida. The eviction filing fee is not a single number the way Florida's $185 is, but it does not swing wildly by county the way Georgia's does either. Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1) sets one statewide base fee of $310 for the first paper filed in any civil action, including an eviction, and every county's district court charges that base plus its own county law library fee, which each county's law library board sets with its county board's approval under Minn. Stat. § 134A.09. We checked that add-on in 13 counties spanning the state's biggest metro courts and some of its smallest rural ones — Hennepin, Ramsey, Dakota, Anoka, Washington, Olmsted, Stearns, Wright, Cook, Traverse, Kittson, Beltrami, Lyon, and Rock — and the total eviction filing fee we found ran from $320.00 (Cook, Wright, Beltrami, Lyon and Rock, each adding a $10 library fee) to $325.00 (Ramsey, Olmsted, Traverse, Anoka, Dakota and Washington, each adding $15), with Hennepin at $322.00 (a $12 library fee) and Stearns at $324.00 (a $14 library fee) in between. Because that variation is real and driven by county-level decisions, not a printing quirk, we are calling Minnesota's filing fee varying rather than fixed, even though the spread of $5 is far narrower than what a filer sees in Georgia or Indiana.

The statutory caps

These are the statewide base amounts set by statute, before any county's own law library fee is added. We confirmed the $55 writ-issuance fee and the $100 separate jury-demand fee hold at that flat amount with no local add-on in every county we checked (Cook and Ramsey among them), which is different from the $310 filing fee, the $65 conciliation fee, and the $310/$410 appeal fees, all of which do pick up a local library fee on top of the numbers shown here.

Source: Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1); § 134A.09; § 134A.10, District court filing fees; county law library fees. Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2, as most recently amended by 2025 c 35 art 1 s 20; § 134A.09 (county law library boards) has no year-specific dollar figure because it delegates the amount to each county. $310 is the base fee printed in Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1) for the first paper filed in any civil action, and Minnesota does not carve out a separate, lower number for an eviction the way some states do — it is the same base as an ordinary civil lawsuit. Layered on top, county by county, is the law library fee: Minn. Stat. § 134A.09 lets "the law library board of trustees" set that amount "with the approval of the board of commissioners," and we could not find any statewide dollar cap on it. In the 13 counties we checked it ran from $10 to $15, for eviction totals of $320 to $325, but nothing in the statute stops a county from setting it higher. Checked August 1, 2026.

Every one of Minnesota's 87 counties has its own District Court, and an eviction is filed in the county where the rental property sits, so this site can safely publish Minnesota county by county the way it publishes Florida, not the way it has to caveat Ohio. The 87 counties are grouped into ten judicial districts for staffing and administration — Hennepin and Ramsey are each their own single-county district, while the other eight districts share a judge pool across anywhere from four to seventeen counties — but that grouping does not change which county's court hears your case or what its own filing fee is. In Hennepin and Ramsey, eviction cases run through a Housing calendar inside the Civil Division of the District Court, not a separate court, so "housing court" there is still the same District Court and the same clerk's office as everything else.

The eviction filing fee is not one number statewide, but the variation is smaller and more mechanical than in a state like Georgia. Every county charges the same $310.00 base set by state statute, then adds its own local law library fee on top. In the 13 counties we checked, that add-on was $10.00, $12.00, $14.00, or $15.00, for total eviction filing fees of $320.00 to $325.00. There is no statutory ceiling on how high a county could set that add-on, so treat $325.00 as what we have actually seen, not a guaranteed ceiling everywhere.

Minnesota separates who serves the initial eviction paperwork from who can put a tenant out. The summons and complaint can be served by the sheriff or, like an ordinary civil lawsuit, by any adult who is not a party to the case. Physically executing the writ of recovery after judgment is different: state law requires a law enforcement officer for that step. Either way, what the sheriff charges for service or for executing the writ is set by each county's own county board, not by state law, so this site cannot publish one statewide sheriff fee for Minnesota the way it can for Florida. Hennepin County's own current numbers are $100.00 to serve one person and $200.00 to execute the writ, but that is Hennepin's schedule, not the state's.

A jury is available in both an eviction and a small claims case, but Minnesota juries in these cases are six people, not twelve, and demanding one costs a flat $100.00 everywhere in the state — the one filing-related number in this record that did not pick up a local library-fee surcharge in any county we checked. Conciliation Court itself never seats a jury; a party who wants one has to remove the case to district court before judgment, or appeal a Conciliation Court judgment to district court, and either path uses this same $100.00 jury fee on top of the regular district court fee rather than a small-claims-specific jury charge.

Nobody pays to answer or appear as a defendant in a Minnesota eviction or small claims case. We checked the statewide fee schedule and 13 individual county pages and found no line item for a defendant's answer or appearance in either case type — the fees on a county's page belong entirely to whoever files the case.

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